Up In The Air

George Clooney movies come in two kinds: those where he eases us along on his good-looking charm (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) and those where he plays against his image by being silly (Burn After Reading) or morally compromised (Michael Clayton). In Up in the Air, he does both at the same time, and the result is an acute, funny, unsettling comedy perfectly suited to our floundering times. He stars as Ryan Bingham, an HR wizard who spends most of his life flying around the country firing people. Although he takes pride in being a sensitive hatchet man, what really jazzes him is his friction-free life with its impersonal hotel rooms, platinum-card car rentals, and airline loyalty schemes. Blithely immune to personal attachments, Ryan is jetting toward the holy grail of ten million frequent-flier miles when his world is rocked by two very different women: Natalie, a smug 23-year-old exec, played by Anna Kendrick, who proposes firing people over Internet video hookups (there goes Ryan’s lifestyle), and Alex (Vera Farmiga), a wry, sexy businesswoman who appears to be Ryan’s soul mate. Talk about an existential crisis. Not only do these women threaten his extremely bearable lightness of being, they may well be wiser than he is. The movie was directed and co-written (with Sheldon Turner) by Jason Reitman, who, after a promising debut with Thank You for Smoking and a popular hit with Juno, here takes a huge leap forward in artistic sophistication. Up in the Air preserves the keen observational wit of Walter Kirn’s original novel, yet gives Ryan’s rambling existence both an exuberant lyricism and an unexpected emotional resonance. Reitman wins superb performances from Kendrick, who finds the decent soul peering out from behind Natalie’s corporate brittleness, and from the astonishing Farmiga, whose lazily amused sexual chemistry with Clooney is one of the year’s great treats. He also orchestrates a perfectly modulated star turn from Clooney, who exudes such infectious pleasure as the footloose Ryan that at first we don’t realize that, far from being a hero, he’s actually somebody we wouldn’t like to be: an untethered man whose real gift is serving up soothing b.s. Not that Ryan’s a bad guy. On the contrary, what makes Up in the Air so good is that, unlike most Hollywood comedies, it doesn’t make anyone the patsy—not even Ryan’s slightly pushy boss (played by the reliably enjoyable Jason Bateman). Instead it achieves an almost-perfect tonal equipoise, balancing scenes of spritzing frivolity with serious ones filled with genuine sympathy for the victims of today’s economic downturn. Up in the Air is hardly a call to revolution, of course—this is a Hollywood movie—but long after the last half-hour’s sentimental gambits, we remember the sadness and shame on the faces of the people who’ve lost their jobs. No wonder Ryan spends his life hoping he never touches down.